Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen
Page 21
When my brother escorted Richardis and me back to the barge, he seemed to walk on air. “Never forget how fortunate you are, sister! It’s a rare nun who receives such patronage. Heinrich is loyal and honest. He’ll look after you.”
My heart overflowed as we sailed past Rupertsberg once more.
“This is ours!”
Taking Richardis’s hands, I led her in a dance around the swaying barge. I felt young again, energy tingling in my veins, as though I were that child racing through the forest with my brother. Except now I was a woman grown and, instead of being a mere passenger on life’s chariot, I had taken hold of the reins and was driving it ever forward, blazing my own path.
“It will be magnificent! We shall build an abbey big enough to house fifty nuns! Families of the nobility will rejoice to send their daughters when they see how beautiful our house is.”
“You grow ever bolder,” Richardis said.
I shot her a glance, bracing myself for her disapproval, then relaxed to see the admiration in her eyes.
What a life we would lead when my dream was made real! My soul rose on crane’s wings to the very heights. Was this how men felt when they seized their power and caused great changes to come about? I felt as though I were a knight, fully armed and astride a galloping destrier. Nothing can stop me now.
“The ingratitude!” Cuno’s rage crackled like lightning. “We have looked after you since you were a child. Now you wish to leave, taking with you the fame and fortune you have gained under our patronage. And you spoke not a word to me first but went over my head to the archbishop.”
I had expected resistance, expected him to lay me low and come up with a thousand reasons why I was too weak and unworthy to lead my daughters to their new home and to live without what he called his guidance and protection. But I’d no idea to what depths he would stoop.
Trembling in his fury, he raised his hand, which made me flinch, for I was convinced he would strike me. Instead, he gestured to every monk, nun, and novice assembled in the chapter house, inviting them to join him in dressing me down. His mob of monks glared at me as though I were a sow with three heads.
“Why would this foolish woman want to leave our house where she has lacked nothing to set up camp in a muddy field?”
“My lord abbot,” I managed. “God has shown me in a vision that I must build a new community at Rupertsberg.”
“God, or your own vainglory?” Breaking the Rule, my abbot roared in laughter, as though determined to grind me to dust beneath his feet. “Do not deceive yourself that this is God’s will.”
“She is deceived by the devil,” Egon proclaimed. “As we suspected from the beginning.”
“How can you say that when the pope himself declared Sister Hildegard a prophet?” Volmar demanded. Behind his anger, I sensed his terror of what Cuno would do to punish me.
“The Holy Father has granted her permission to write of her visions,” Cuno said, his voice curt and dismissive, “not to abandon all obedience and humility. He certainly hasn’t given her leave to remove her nuns and their dowries to some ruined hermitage.”
“What woman has ever founded a monastery?” Egon seemed eager to ape Cuno’s contempt of me. “It’s unheard of.”
“The hermitage of Rupertsberg itself was built by the holy Bertha of Bingen,” Richardis said, looking shaken but defiant. “To honor her son, the sainted Rupert. And I have read that in England in the age of Saint Aidan, Hilda of Whitby founded a double monastery where she was abbess over both monks and nuns.”
I threw her such a look of gratitude before I faced Cuno once more. “My lord abbot, Heinrich, Archbishop of Mainz, has already given me permission and the freehold of Rupertsberg.”
How dare Cuno stand in the way of what the archbishop had ordained? But Heinrich was far away and Cuno looked angry enough to spit.
“You double-crossed the archbishop. Like Eve, you hoodwinked him into bending to your will.”
“Like Eve, she is beguiled by the devil,” said Egon, who appeared to relish mentioning the False One whenever he could.
I looked at Richardis, who stood stricken. Then Guda stepped forward.
“Magistra,” Guda said, the girl I had nurtured from the age of five. Though she addressed me, she bowed her head in deference to the men. “Pray heed our abbot’s counsel. How can we abandon our home? Our sisters and novices are daughters of the nobility. Surely we can’t expect wellborn girls to live in tents like camp followers while you build the new monastery, even supposing you can raise the monies. Magistra, would you condemn us to penury?”
I shook my head at her, my eyes blurring at the shock of her betrayal. Had she completely forgotten the horrors of our anchorage, the prison we would still be living in had I not taken a stand? Maybe, like Jutta, Guda had come to love her prison. Or perhaps this place had broken her to the degree that she couldn’t imagine any other life.
“It was a mistake to allow you to travel to Mainz.” Cuno spoke with finality. “For it has swollen you with unholy pride. Hildegard, hear your penance—you are not to set foot outside the abbey gates for the rest of your mortal life.”
12
MY ABBOT NEEDED neither chains nor rack to torture me, neither poison nor fire to lay me in my grave. When he scourged me with the worst possible penance—eternal captivity within his walls after my tantalizing taste of freedom—it was as though he had heaped boulders upon my chest, crushing my lungs, shattering my every rib. My eyes clouded over till I could no longer see. My flesh was laid waste, my stomach seething till I could neither eat nor drink. Overwhelmed by intense pains, I collapsed on my bed and there I remained as though fettered. They could not even manage to move me to the infirmary.
“The magistra must have drunk unclean water on her journey,” Brother Otto said, as he fretted by my bedside. Though the gentle old physician labored tirelessly, I fevered, trapped in a torpor. Everything in my world had turned to ash.
Against the abbot’s wishes, Volmar visited me daily. “Hildegard, I never thought I would see you like this. You were always so fierce and fiery.”
In my weakened state, every barrier between us as monk and nun, man and woman, broke down. He held my hand and stroked my brow as tenderly as Richardis did. And what a price Volmar paid for his loyalty to me, coming to offer me his comfort in defiance of Cuno, who punished him by ordering him to lie prone in the chapter house doorway so that all his brethren might tread on him. Yet even the most humiliating penance couldn’t tear Volmar from my side.
Richardis and Volmar knew the true reason for my malady—Cuno had at last broken my spirit. Perhaps the time had come to admit defeat. Not many reached the age of forty-nine years. Maybe this was meant to be the end of my story.
“I have written to my mother and your brother,” Richardis whispered. “Even the archbishop. I told them everything.”
How good she was, and yet I wondered if her efforts weren’t in vain. Her mother was in faraway Stade. Even if the margravine made the long journey here, I might be dead by the time she arrived. As for Rorich, would he intervene or would he silently regret bringing me to Mainz in the first place? The archbishop was a busy man with mountains of correspondence. Most likely, Richardis’s letter would fall into the hands of some lesser clerk rather than the archbishop’s own. Even if the message reached him, I could hardly expect Heinrich to sail up the Nahe just to rescue me. Disibodenberg was so remote and cut off from the rest of the world, allowing Cuno to play the despot with none to stand in his way.
“You should be the new magistra after me,” I told Richardis. “Adelheid is wise and scholarly, but she prefers books to people. Guda is motherly with the novices, but she lacks courage and conviction. You possess both love and wisdom. Your true name is not Richardis but Caritas.” My vision of the Lady of Divine Love glimmered before me, that black-haired maiden, clothed in crimson, crowned in gold. “You would make the best abbess. Perhaps you might see Rupertsberg built, even if I don’t.”
“When I am gone, Cuno will relax his rule,” I told her. “It is me he fights, me he despises. It shall be easier for the rest of you when I depart this place.”
Before Richardis could say a word, Guda’s voice rang out. “Magistra, the church is packed with pilgrims begging for an audience with you.”
“You can see for yourself how ill she is,” Richardis said, an edge to her voice as she spoke to her cousin. She held a protective arm over my chest so that I couldn’t have risen even if I’d had the strength.
Ignoring her, Guda pressed on. “Magistra, do you at least have a message I can deliver to them?”
“Yes,” I said. “A mighty voice has forbidden me to speak or write anything more of my visions while we are imprisoned in this place.”
“I’m to tell this to your pilgrims who have walked for weeks just to hear your voice?” Guda demanded.
Richardis sighed. “I will tell them!”
I listened to her footfalls as she marched to the screen looking into the church, once my only window into the outside world. Then I heard her tell the pilgrims what I had told her, word for word. Their outcry arose in a deafening din. Such a journey they had made only to find their sibyl had withdrawn into a cocoon of silence. No one within the walls of Disibodenberg could remain in ignorance of their dismay.
“The gossip will spread like fire,” Guda said. “Because of you, they’ll call our abbot a tyrant.”
“The truth must be spoken.”
“If the pilgrims stop coming, the entire abbey will be poorer.”
“Cuno complains how much they eat, yet he’ll miss their donations.” I stifled a smile.
“You did this out of malice! Are we all to suffer for your ambition, magistra?”
Her words lashed me like a scorpion’s tail.
“Guda.” I reached through the dark fog to find her hand. “Do you remember when you were a girl of five and so furious with me? You blamed me for your misery over being confined here and then you threw such a tantrum that you smashed all my herb pots.”
What I would have given to coax any sign of warmth from her. But Guda’s hand stiffened in mine and she snatched it away.
The fever raging through me made me lose track of the days until rough hands wrenched me from my stupor. Through the haze that cauled my eyes, I saw Cuno, he who had never physically touched me or any living woman, who had only dared to touch Jutta when she was dead. Now he took my arms in a bruising grip and tried to heave me from my bed.
“You make a mockery of us all. You will speak to your pilgrims.”
“My lord abbot, please! You’re hurting her.” Richardis attempted to pull him off me, but he shoved her away.
Yet as hard as Cuno struggled to manhandle me, he could not move me from my bed. My body turned to lead. A force greater than his weighed me down.
A blur in the background, Egon harped yet again about the devil. “Only infernal powers could make her so stiff. An incubus lies upon her—this is why she can’t be moved.”
Unable to keep any nourishment in my belly without heaving it back up, I must have resembled our departed Jutta. Richardis’s tears burned my face. She held me so tightly, as though to keep me in this world. But everything was fading fast, as if I were being sucked into a tunnel of mist. I hardly felt Volmar’s touch as he anointed me with oils in the rites of the dying, hardly felt the Host on my tongue as he offered me the viaticum. My sisters’ voices were ghostly and muffled as my soul wafted its way up that passage where darkness and light swirled in an endless vortex.
Then, O miracle, the dimness faded from my eyes to reveal Walburga’s face—she whom I knew to be long dead. My old nurse hugged me to her breast. Over my fevered body she chanted the charms she used to croon over me in earliest childhood when I lay ill. Jutta appeared, her wasted body restored to its youth and beauty, and she gave me the kiss of peace. “Lux aeterna,” she murmured. My long-dead mother came forward to embrace me, tenderly rubbing my hair. Tears in her eyes, Mother gently pushed me away from her, propelling me back down that tunnel, out of this realm of spirit and back into the world of flesh and blood. Awaken!
My unclouded eyes opened to see Richardis and Volmar. My sisters gathered round, crying as they chanted their prayers. Even Guda wept. I recoiled at the sight of Cuno looming over my bed until I detected the fear and uncertainty coming off him like a foul odor. The pilgrims, I would come to learn, were casting aspersions his way, saying that his harshness had silenced me and rendered me mortally ill. What would happen when such talk reached the archbishop? My suffering exposed Cuno’s cruelty in a blinding light.
Behind him cowered Egon. The prior, who had taken every opportunity to slander me and call my visions diabolical, found his throat swollen in a horrendous goiter, as though God had punished him for everyone to see. Both Cuno and Egon seemed to quake before the specter of my body that gave the appearance of the very pall of death.
“Cuno.” I grasped my abbot’s hand.
His face blazed red, as if he were affronted that I would dare touch him. He stiffened as if my hand were a serpent coiling around his, yet he dared not pull away.
At least a dozen monks were crowded round, forming an outer circle. Their eyes shone in sadness, these men who had been my quiet allies, those gentle brothers of the library and scriptorium, the herb garden and hospice. The nuns’ dormitory was so packed that it resembled a chapter house meeting in miniature—one with a very ill woman at its center.
“You who are a father in your office,” I said to Cuno, “I pray that now you may be a father to me in deed. Have mercy on me.”
“My mercy you have,” he said woodenly. “And my forgiveness,” he added, as though to remind everyone that I, not he, was the erring one.
“Will you allow me to depart in peace?” I asked him.
“Go in peace, dearest daughter in Christ,” he said.
Behind his pious words beat his loud hope that he would soon be rid of me, that he would bury me in the cold earth, brush the grave dirt off his hands.
“Do you promise before God to release me?” I asked him, still clinging to his hand. “Release me and my sisters from this confinement you have held us in?”
His nostrils flared as he understood how I had tricked him. But he held on to his composure lest he disgrace himself on the deathbed of some nun who would soon be forgotten.
“I am no prison keeper,” he said, puffing out his chest. “After you leave us for your true and eternal home, the sisters are free to join the nuns of Schönau if they so desire, for Disibodenberg was never meant to be a double monastery but merely to provide an anchorage for the sainted Jutta, now in heaven, may she pray for us all.”
At last he had spoken his true will—to be rid of us women while still holding on to our dowries, no doubt.
“And if through God’s grace, I were to regain my health,” I said, my fingers pressing his, which went clammy in my grip, “do you swear before God that my sisters and I may leave for Rupertsberg?”
The look he gave me then was so murderous that there was no telling what he might have done had we been alone in that room. But with all those eyes on him, he had no choice but to feign magnanimity. He arranged his face in an attitude of deep regret.
“I fear that it is too late for you, Hildegard, to place your hope in miracles. You must submit to God’s true will. But should you ever recover your full strength, then you are free to go to Rupertsberg.” He spoke as though he were a gracious man pacifying the ravings of a hysterical woman. I could almost hear his inner turmoil as he tried to convince himself that this was a matter of no consequence, that I would never again rise from my bed.
Seven days passed and still I did not die. Indeed, I rallied, sitting up in bed to take the turtle broth and
milk-soaked bread Richardis offered me. Verdant power, like the sun gleaming through beech leaves, shot through my veins. Something was stirring, something was coming—my senses were honed and alert.
On the ninth day, a mud-spattered woman burst into our nunnery, bringing with her the smell of horses and sweat. Richardis leapt from my bedside, her face lifting in joy.
“Mother!” she cried, throwing her arms around our guest. “I knew you would come.”
After kissing her daughter, the Margravine von Stade seized my hand. Steel shone in her eyes. Here was a woman as firm and upright as a spear.
“I met with the Archbishop of Mainz.” Wasting no words, she handed me a scrolled letter. “Here’s his decree written in his own hand. Cuno is to release you and all the nuns without delay and obstruct you no longer. I have horses on loan for the journey.”
I could only gape at her in awe.
“Everything is arranged,” she said. “I have endowed Rupertsberg. The stone masons and carpenters are already there, waiting to begin work under your direction.”
“But, Aunt, our magistra is still very weak,” Guda said, her face white with shock. “It will do her no good to leave Disibodenberg for some makeshift shelter.”
Richardis cradled my cheek. “Speak the truth, Hildegard. Are you well enough to make the journey?”
“God has delivered our miracle.” My heart opened wide. “Now God shall grant me strength. Daughters, bring me food and drink. We have much work to do.”
The novices hugged each other, exclaiming what an adventure it would be, sleeping beneath the stars on that beautiful hill covered in apple trees. How romantic this sounded to my young women who only knew the stranglehold of our existence within Cuno’s walls.